Over the years, people raise their children and watch them as they make their adult lives away from home. Because of that, seniors lose contact and intimacy with their loved ones, as physical presence isn’t as possible as desirable. Also, because of physical impairments that may arrive as years pass by, seniors may experience difficulties in communicating and interacting. Thus, a research project called PAELife (Personal Assistant for the Elderly Life) was created with the aim of fighting isolation and exclusion. Our personal contribution to this project is displaying the most active contacts in a visual, powerful way so that they notice which friends are contacting them more and which ones don’t contact in a long time. To achieve that, we built a set of prototypes that display contacts’ activity from different sources (email, social networks, etc.) and performed two user tests, in order to identify the best alternatives and understand if the senior citizens can correctly perceive the contacts’ activity. The tests’ feedback allowed us to know what prototypes to choose and the ones to discard. After analyzing the results we implemented a final functional prototype that matched all the requirements collected from the users.

1. Contact Activity Visualization for
Seniors
Ana Almeida, Micael Carreira, Joaquim A. Jorge, Daniel Gonçalves

2. Motivation

3. Motivation

4. Motivation

5. Problem

6. Sensorial, Motor, Cognitive Difficulties

7. Senior Citizens` Limitations
Crews and Campbell, 2004
Van de Watering, 2005

8. Engaging the Seniors
Gregor and Newell, 2001
Coleman et al., 2010
Lindsay et al., 2012

9. Problem
PAELife Project (Personal Assistant for the
Elderly Life)
Multimodal personal assistant

10. Objective
Visually display the most
active contacts

11. RELATED WORK

12. Representing People and Groups
Onzec and Farnham, 2011
Deiml-Seibt et al., 2009
Erickson and Laff, 2001
Morikawa and Aizawa, 2012

13. Implications
Contacts’activity must be displayed
Should display the avatars of the contacts
Interface informative but simple
Appropriate to work with many contacts

14. Implications
Ability of creating groups of contacts
Display activity on different time periods
Activity module integrated with the AALfred
application

15. CONTACT ACTIVITY
VISUALIZATION

16. Context
Make it possible for the seniors to
communicate
Show the contacts` activity

17. Low-Fidelity Prototypes
General Activity
Activity from Sources
Notifications

18. L.F. Prototypes (General Activity)

19. L. F. Prototypes (Activity from Sources)

20. L. F. Prototypes (Activity from Sources)

21. L.F. Prototypes (Notifications)

22. User Tests
20 people
Male and Female
60 to 96 years old
nursing homes in
Parede and Lisbon

23. User Tests
Non-parametric chi-square test
If no statistically significant results were found,
we evaluated the results based on general
preference

24. User Tests (General Activity)
40%
(p=0,371)
60%

25. User Tests (Activity from Sources)
(p=0,655)

26. User Tests (Activity from Sources)
(p=0,025) (p=0,004)

27. User Tests (Notifications)
10% 25% 65%

28. First Functional Prototypes
Implemented based on the results from the
previous phase
Ficticious information

29. F.F. Prototypes (General Activity)

30. F.F. Prototypes (Activity in Sources and
Notifications)

31. F.F. Prototypes (Activity in Sources and
Notifications)

32. F.F. Prototypes

33. User Tests
15 people
Male and Female
68 to 90 years old
nursing home in
Lisbon

34. User Tests
Non-parametric chi-square test
If no statistically significant results were found,
we evaluated the results based on general
preference

35. User Tests (General Activity)
Only one prototype
Questioned about the perceptibility of the whole
concept
65%

36. User Tests (Activity from Sources)
93%
33%
(p=0,004)

37. User Tests (Notifications)
(p=0,071)

38. IMPLEMENTATION

39. Displaying Contacts
Simple contact display

40. Displaying Contacts
Contact display with activity from sources and
notifications

41. Information Collection
Social Networks API
Facebook Messages and Likes
Twitter Messages
Emails Sent

42. Activity’s Assessment

43. Visualize Activity Since...

44. Group Visualization

45. Managing Groups

46. Managing Contacts

47. Managing Contacts

49. Final Display

50. Final Display

51. EVALUATION

52. User Tests
15 people
Male and Female
70 to 91 years old
nursing homes in
Lisbon

53. User Tests
Task Completion
Confidence Intervals
Chi-square tests

54. User Tests
60%
Comparison of activity
between two contacts
confidence interval: [7.9;48] seconds

55. User Tests
40%
Biggest/smallest
contact
confidence interval: [3.1;30.9] seconds

56. User Tests (Tasks)
Create new Group
confidence interval: [33;91.2] seconds
Average of: 1 error

57. User Tests (Tasks)
Rename (and delete) a Group
confidence interval: [26.5;80] seconds
Average of: 1 error

58. User Tests (Tasks)
Move (and remove) Contacts to
Group
Average of 100 seconds

59. User Tests (Tasks)
Visualize Activity Since...
confidence interval: [13.17;34.17] seconds
Average of: 0 errors

60. User Tests (Debriefing)
(p=0,205)

61. User Tests (Debriefing)
Main challenges due to lack of knowledge and
fear to fail
Users didn’t know where to start
Users that use technology found the tasks easy to
complete

62. CONCLUSION

63. Conclusion
Interaction with close friends and family is
desired: PAELife is a solution to bring people
together
Users found interesting to have more ways to
interact with their families

64. Conclusion
Include the users in the development process
since the beginning
Known features for seniors are to be taken into
consideration
Keep tasks simple to avoid abandonment

65. Conclusion
Conclusions regarding the achievement of the
objectives are not as accurate as desired

66. Future Work
Explore more ways to visualize activity
Develop new ways to display groups and
contacts management
Find ways to test the solution with real data

67. Thank you!